The King’s Speech isn’t only fine as a costume drama involving royalty past and present. It’s a profound investigation of troubles that lie deep in the personalities of many of us, and its sophistication lies in the way these issues are partially concealed to create a smooth-running piece of popular entertainment.
It’s been dubbed a buddy movie about a good moment in the lives of a frequently dysfunctional family, but it’s more than that. It’s about how a younger brother became the victim of oppression by his family, the state and the church, and how a wind of change from the other side of the globe was needed to help heal a profound inner disorder.
The UK’s King George VI, “Bertie,” stammered so badly that half the nation held its breath during the endless pauses in his broadcast speeches. Pre-recording seems to have not been an available option, and the film is an account of his treatment by a man who understood the psychological roots of such disorders through his experience with shell-shocked survivors of World War I.
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Superficially the movie holds our attention through the social contrasts between a suffering royal and a down-market therapist. Logue gets Bertie to sing, dance, swear and roll on the floor to unblock his body’s habit of freezing up at crucial moments, with Bertie three times experiencing an instinctive, partly class-based rejection of his therapist. The film is funny and touching at the same time, but underneath, the most serious issues are being investigated.
Two family figures lie behind Bertie’s problem. First there’s his father, King George V, who bellows at him, telling him to stand up straight and face the microphone like a man. Then there’s his elder brother David, briefly to be King Edward VIII, who taunts him as “B-b-b-Bertie” and reduces him to a gasping silence in one memorable scene.
But his father had done more than shout. Bertie had been born left-handed, Logue discovers, and was punished until he changed to his right. A nanny had favored David and starved Bertie after daily ritual “parental viewings” of the two brothers. Bertie had longed to make model planes but was made instead to collect stamps like his father. One of the movie’s most touching moments is when he’s allowed to glue a strut onto one of Logue’s son’s model planes, like the child he had never been permitted to be.
Paradoxically, David makes his own successful bid for freedom by renouncing the throne to marry the twice-divorced US citizen Wallis Simpson. And, strangely, Bertie’s troubles are not represented as being sexual. He appears to live a particularly happy family life, though a parable he tells his daughters about a penguin who went to the Antarctic may have its own telling implications.
The second oppressive force in Bertie’s life is the state. We see a council of elders forcing the dying George V to sign away his powers, and it’s to a similar body of men that Bertie has to present himself and speak on acceding to the crown.
Finally there’s the Church of England, represented by its head, the Archbishop of Canterbury. His clash with Bertie is shown during preparations for the coronation in Westminster Abbey. But by now, with Logue at his side, Bertie is gaining in confidence and wins the confrontation.
This film has moved many people, and the reason isn’t hard to find. It isn’t only about a king, just as Hamlet isn’t only about a prince and the Iliad isn’t about heroic warriors. The King’s Speech, like these other masterpieces, is about all of us.
Entire generations have been victimized by unimaginative fathers and acquiescent mothers. (George’s wife, Queen Mary, hardly betrays any emotion, bar the beginnings of a smile during Bertie’s successful closing speech). Even if we weren’t unfortunate enough to be left-handers who were forced to change, we have suffered in other ways. If families are collections of people you’d never want to know if they weren’t related, this film endorses that bleak description.
This argument is not meant to belittle the movie’s wonderful acting and the meticulous historical background. It instead praises the script, and the entire concept. And this investigation into the roots of our discontents is made persuasive by its being so entertaining, just as Hamlet, whatever it may say about life and death, is invariably entertaining. You only have to consider the terseness of the writing to appreciate this.
“I’ve no idea what an Australian might do for that sort of money,” says Bertie over a shilling (NT$3) Logue has wagered with him during their uneasy early meetings. And then, after the final success of Bertie’s first wartime speech, when Logue remarks, “You still stammered on the ‘w,’” Bertie is given a priceless line as a reply.
“Had to throw in a few,” he says, in perfectly clipped royal tones, “so they knew it was me.”
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